Various sorts of voting, polling and two-way TV systems are known in the art. Such systems are described for example in U.S. Pat. No. 4,536,791; Aug. 20, 1985 to John G. Campbell, et al. for Addressable Cable Television Control System with Video Format Data Transmission.
Satellite communication systems for TV are also well known in the art, as exemplified by U.S. Pat. No. 4,684,980; Aug. 4 1987 to Robert M. Rast et al. for System for Controlling Communications on a Cable Television Network, wherein a ground based audience polling system is disclosed and the satellite station is used for transmission only of TV programming.
Former audience polling TV systems, whether cable, broadcast or hybrid in nature, have been limited in performance generally to billing and accounting and purchasing functions or central processing of audience response data for use in listenership analysis and the like by network listener ranking agencies, for example.
It is however an object of this invention to provide TV audience polling systems capable of current or on-line review of polling results by the audience being polled.